St Vincent's
by semurdoch
Summary: Matt Murdoch is a blind vigilante known as Daredevil, this is true. Deep in his heart, he hates what he has had to become to protect his city. What he never thought he would do is give someone the chance to make this their fate too.
1. what he doesn't know

It's raining. I can hear every drop, I can feel the storm expanding around me. I can smell the moisture, the acid rain making everything sodden with it's disease. The heat of the city lights being reflected off the pavement, the rain making the concrete a temporary funhouse mirror. I can feel it all. My eyes are open, but they see nothing. I see everything. I can feel the underlying hum of the city that follows me everywhere. I can hear hundreds of televisions, microwaves, laptops, car engines. Voices, fighting, snoring, crying. Energy from buildings, generators, the sheer amount of energy Hell's Kitchen alone is producing right now hits me. Everything, all of it, creates a type of visual. A multilayered image of a world on fire. Red, boiling… pure hellfire. I let it all in. I let it consume me.

"So where were you last night?" Foggy asks me, his voice hushed and hurried. I quickly listen for a moment, asserting that Karen is indeed not in the office. I reply evenly, in a normal tone. "I was watching the rain." This is the truth, I tell myself.  
"Good one," says Foggy. "A blind man makes a pun about his blindness. Classic. Have you ever thought about going to one of those sensitivity training classes? Maybe it will help with business." I chuckle, but give no reply. My hands are running quickly over a case file. It's lunch but Foggy and I are too busy to go get anything ourselves. If I listen closely enough, I can hear Karen down the block getting us lunch; proof of how busy we are at this very moment. I wonder to myself, if we're so busy that Karen has to fetch us lunch, why is Foggy suddenly inquiring about my night? I stop my hands, suddenly nervous.  
"What's up Foggy?" I ask.  
"What do you mean 'what's up'? I can't ask about your night?" He retorts.  
"You've got something on your mind. Why else would you ask about my night in the middle of all this?" I say, using my hands to blindly refer to the paperwork that is surrounding us. We're in the conference room instead of our offices, working together in silence on this case. "You… seem tired. But also not beat up. No bruises, for once." Foggy comments, and I can hear the smirk in his tone. He's teasing me. "What are you saying?" I ask.  
"Could there have a been a girl?" He says, "Perhaps a beautiful one you should tell me all about?" His voice squeaks in half-hearted excitement. Really, I think he's just glad I'm not out 'being a martyr' as he calls it. But the possibility of a girl, definitely excites him. "You could say that…" "Please, tell me all the gory details before Karen gets back!" He begs, and when I don't answer right away he rolls up a piece of paper and lobs it at me. Hearing it whistle through the air, I backhand it at just the right second so that it goes back and hits Foggy gently in the nose. "Foggy, I swear if that was a case file I'll-" "You'll what Matt? Beat me up with your weird blind-person powers? I don't see that happening." He laughs, making a very good point. "I'll leave you here to do this all yourself." "Yeah nice try, half of this shit is yours too. And Karen would kill you." He says, again making valid points that make me smile. "Please tell me about the girl."

I sigh quietly, not knowing how to explain. I think back to the rain, to the storm surrounding me, to the energy bouncing off of everything. I was on top of my roof, listening to the city. Particularly a hospital.  
In my bed at night I kept hearing a sort of crying, a sorrow that resonated so deeply inside of me it found me in my deepest sleep to wake me up. So I listened and listened until I finally found the source, a beacon of light in a gleaming city under darkness. It was a female voice crying, a body stirring in a bed, a rapid but steady heartbeat. I remember distinctly hearing her scratch at bandages, no not bandages; restraints. I wanted to know why she was there, why she was crying so softy by herself chained to a hospital bed. She couldn't be sick, her heartbeat was so strong and quick. Like her body needed her blood circulated faster than normal, like she was burning through all of her energy. Then I heard police officers, two of them in her room. I still mistrusted the police, even if Fisk was put away and his paid men put to jail. There was always a chance that a cop was dirty. They questioned her, I couldn't make out all of it. Her heartbeat was so incredibly loud that, paired with all the noises of the machines and the city itself, it drowned out their words. I heard some things, something about a lab and an "accident". Maybe something about stealing, but also murder? After the entire conversation was done, I realized she was just about to be charged with a crime. But why was she in a hospital? Why had her heart stayed steady while she answered her questions, other than the fact she was obviously innocent of whatever crime they were bestowing upon her? My curiosity burned me from the inside out.

I try explaining this as best I can to Foggy, the girl and how I need to know what's going on. I tell him I'm leaving after the office to visit her, see if maybe I can offer her legal advice.

"You're crazy, Matt. Nothing about this is as sexy as I'd hoped and I am honestly disappointed." Foggy tells me, and I can tell he's frowning. "Please, just listen," I tell him, "This could be a potential client. With an interesting case! Trust me on this once." He considers my logic for a few moments while we work. "Just figure out how you're going to explain how you found out about her case. Maybe do some real research about it first? Like a real life lawyer? Be careful."

Foggy's serious tone and genuine concern has been a prominent feature in our friendship ever since he found out about me being Daredevil, and hearing all the stories about me almost dying. It made the usually lighthearted Foggy a worried friend, one he had never been so routinely. It makes my heart sink.  
"Ill be careful." I reassure him.

The rest of the day goes by fairly quickly, the piles of papers and files slowly being organized and used to help build our current case. One about a young African American man being charged with accessory to a robbery. He was only half innocent; waited in the car unknowingly as the getaway driver, but then also didn't call the police once he knew what they had done. "Karen," I say, "I'm leaving a bit early tonight… to deal with a potential client. See you tomorrow? Maybe we can all go out for drinks over the weekend." Even without my abilities I can tell she's smiling. I hear her hair rustle as she nods enthusiastically, and then curses because she remembers I can't see that. I leave her with a smile, trying not to show how worried I am about the girl. Something about her crying, it makes me feel anxious to find out how her condition is. I catch a cab to the hospital, St. Vincent's. It's closer to my apartment than it is to the office, I'm glad I won't have a hard time getting home. It's small, and you probably wouldn't even know it's a hospital from the outside. It was kind of trashed from the incident and even after two and a half years, renovations are still on going. It seems like the type of place someone who was an alleged criminal with injuries would be sent. Once I get there, I stumble in feigning confusion, and once the receptionist sees my glasses and cane, her heart beats a little bit faster. "Can I help you, sir?" She asks, her voice full of sympathy. "Yes… I'm looking a client of mine. I-I seemed to have misplaced her name. We talked on the phone and I had nothing to write her name down on to bring. I thought I could remember… I'm very sorry miss, can you please help me?" I lace my voice with hits of helpfulness and panic. I add to the effect by slightly bumping into her desk, and steadying myself on the edge of it. "Well… can you tell me maybe what she looks like- oh I'm sorry did you say you only talked in the phone?" She asks. Nice save, I thought. "Maybe you can tell me her injuries. I listen closely for her steady heartbeat, locating her room but it's impossible to tell her room number. There's another, more sluggish heartbeat outside of her door. An officer. "Yes. She's only the second floor, mid twenties perhaps, and she's probably the only person in this hospital with a police officer outside her door." I tell her, and listen closely to her heartbeat. It's steady for a second, but when I smell at her, it stutters. I feel bad about it, but I put my hand out and clumsily find hers on the desk. "Please?" I beg. Her heart is hammering as she takes her hand away. "I-I think I know who you're talking about. Her name is Cathleen, does that ring a bell?" I nod. "Cathleen K. O'Connor. Tell the police officer Dana okay'd you. She's on the second floor, room 201." "Thank you so much." I tell her.

I take the elevator up, pressing the button for the second floor (after reading the Braille to make sure). I step out, going to the left where I hear the heartbeats. There are only two on this floor. That's not worrying, I think sarcastically to myself. The officer becomes alert to me as soon as she hears the elevator, probably not expecting anyone. She has the same assumption as the receptionist, that I'm confused or lost. "I come in peace." I say as I approach her, one of my hands held up in surrender, the other on my guiding cane. She seems hesitant, her heart beat fast. She's apprehensive. "Dana said I was "okay'd". I explain. "State your name and business." The police officer commands me. "Matthew Murdoch, with Nelson & Murdoch. I'm a lawyer, I'd like to represent Ms.O'Connor if she does not already have an attorney." By the end of my sentence, her heart starts to slow down. She accepts my explanation. I hear her nod, and then feel the heat from her face as she flushes when she realizes she'd just nodded at a blind man. "Okay, . I'll have to give you a pat down before you go in."  
"I would be worried if you didn't." I assure her.

She indeed gives me a pat down, probably more gently than she would with a sighted person which is fine with me. She probably should take my cane away because it most definitely could be used as a weapon, but she doesn't. Not that I need it. When I go in, the room is smaller than I expected. I can feel the heat radiating off of Cathleen, it feels so good to finally know her name, and try to assess her injuries from across the room. She's silent, her heart slower than usual. She's sleeping. "O'Connor, wake up. Someone is here to see you." The female officer says, and then I realize I hadn't asked her name. Manners, Matty I can hear my dad say in the back of my mind. Cathleen startles away, her hands instinctively bracing against the restraints on her wrists. Her heart spikes, which I can hear on the machine, and then calms when she can see it's just her officer and a blind man. I sit down and explain who I am.

"So, you're a lawyer and you're interested in taking me on as a client. What if I already have a lawyer from the DA's office?" "You can drop them and hire me." "Do you know what crime I'm being charged with, ? Do you know the reason I'm going to jail? Do you know why I'm permanently blinded ? Did Officer Sullivan tell you that?" She's breathing hard now, her heart is beating fast. "Hmm? Did she?"  
I can't believe I missed that. I can't believe I didn't catch the way she whipped her head around, unseeing. I realize now that there is scratching on the skin around her eye sockets. Bandages. Like the ones I got after my accident, in the hospital. I hold my breath for a few seconds, picking my words carefully as I get over my shock. "Miss O'Connor… I am not entirely aware of what you are being charged with. I caught wind of your case from a friend of mine in the police department, who isn't legally allowed to tell me all the details. But your blindness… It makes me want to help you even more." I hate lying to her, but I feel better knowing that the last part is true. I identify with her condition, with her heart ache, with her anger. I understand it.

I walk forward, slowly so that she's knows I'm doing it. She flinches when I get close. I take her hand, it's warm, and place it on the top of my cane. She gasps with realization, and strains against her restraints for a moment. "Y-you're blind?" She whispers, "My god. What type of fucking bad sitcom is this?" It's the wrong time and place, but I chuckle despite myself. This is honestly like a bad Lifetime movie, but it feels right. It feels like I need to help her.

"Cathleen," I say gently, "What are you being accused of?" Her heart takes off.  
"I'm being charged with attempted murder, . And no one believes my story, no one listens." Her heart is fluttering, but I can't tell if it's because she's lying or if it's hard for her to say out loud. "I'll listen to you. If I believe you're innocent, or something about the circumstances you were in makes me believe this is wrong, I will represent you. I will do everything in my power, if you tell me the truth."


	2. someone to believe in

Cathleen drops her lawyer from the DA, and Nelson & Murdoch take her on as a client. The whole process takes two days, and then another two for Foggy and I to sort through her case. It's a lot of material, but she's an established researcher in the scientific community, and she's paying us well. I was surprised she hadn't hired a private lawyer before, but I can see how being suddenly being without your sight in the middle of your life can be distracting from that kind of thing. At least when I was blinded I was young enough to be able to adapt and live my life that way. Cathleen O'Connor is twenty-eight, she's gone to school, has a doctorate. Her life will never be the same. She's not married, she lives alone, she has no family she's in contact with. She is absolutely and one hundred percent on her own.

"Can you please for the record state your name?" Foggy says as he clicks on the recorder between us, and Cathleen. She swallows, I can hear her heart speed up from nervousness. "Cathleen O'Connor." She says, her voice husky and wavering. "What are you being charged with?" A pause.  
"Attempted murder." I can hear the crack of her bones when she makes a fist.  
"Can you please tell and myself what happened on the night of Wednesday, the second of September, twenty-fifteen?" "Yes," she breaths, "I was working late. At the lab… doing research. I'm a geneticist, I do important work on diseases, DNA, particularly with sensory information. Like Sensory Processing Disorder? Hyperosmia?" Cathleen takes a breath, she's breathing hard. Her heart is starting to slow, the beat more regular. "Hyperosmia?" I ask, although I know very well what it is. "A heightened sense of smell, ." She explains, and then continues. "Anyways, the work we do is important. The company I work for wanted everything very under wraps, very hush hush. Look, I have a PhD, I know when to keep my mouth shut and not question anything."  
"But the thing is," she goes on, "is that things started to get a little weird."  
"Define 'weird', Miss O'Connor." Foggy says, jotting down notes. "Weird as in, uncomfortable for me. My supervisor checked in a lot, I'm not even sure he's a real scientist. I was told I was developing something for people with SPD, kids who can't hold their pencils at school, who maybe are really sensitive to light, who hear everything. It's a tough life. But the process, the way we were researching, testing. It was one hundred percent backwards."  
"I was told it was a new way of approaching a problem. 'Figure out the way to make the problem worse and you can figure out how to make it better!' is what my supervisor kept telling me." She mumbles, wringing her hands. "The supervisors name," I ask, "What is it?" "Joe," she says, "Joe Smith." Plain name, easily lost in the system, I note. "We were engineering a virus that would alter genes by going into the nucleus of sensory nerve cells and alter the DNA there. But not to try to correct corrupted genes, or even to combat SPD. We were altering genes to heighten them. To engineer genes that would duplicate, and the virus would spread throughout your body so that when it was done with you, your senses would be a hundred times better than before."  
"So this is some sort of amazing breakthrough right? Look! We've figured out a way for every normal human being to be a superhero! Wrong. We've found a way to totally and inescapably incapacitate a human being by giving them sensory overload."  
She breathing heavily again, her fists closed, I can hear her bones grinding. "We tested it on mice, which I kept thinking was ridiculous because this wasn't what we were supposed to be researching. This wasn't going to help anyone. But they paid me good money… and I was paying off my student loans from undergrad. So I went along with it. The mice, though, the tests. These mice, they didn't necessarily get sensory overload and have a heart attack like I thought they would. Evolution is a marvelous thing, and some of them adapted. Their bodies knew that for them to survive what was happening, they had to drop one of their senses. And you know what their bodies dropped seventy-five percent of the time? Sight." She stops talking for a moment to fumble for to take a sip of water. I can hear Foggy furiously writing, trying to catch up. She clears her throat and continues. "I overheard talking on the phone one night. I was there late running tests on the mice, trying to come up with a reversal of the process. Up until then, all the shady crap, everything that felt wrong… I'd been okay with it. But when I heard what he was talking about- her teeth ground together loudly- I couldn't keep quiet anymore." "He was talking about human trials. Human trials! For a solution that is almost guaranteed to render you blind forever, if it doesn't kill you. So I stepped up, I took a stand, I told him I was done, that this wasn't right."

"What happened next?" I ask, trying to level my breathing. She'd told me briefly all this, but I hadn't heard everything in detail. I couldn't help but clasp my hands under the table, trying to smother my anger like a flame. I can feel Foggy glancing at me worriedly, knowing this all must hit a sore spot.

"I started to leave. I don't know, must have hit a panic button or something. Next thing I know, there are two huge Japanese men blocking my way. I kept thinking, God this is ridiculous! I didn't think…" She trails off, swallowing painfully. Her heart rate monitor speeds up a little bit, but stays steady. "I didn't think," she finally says, "they would do what they did. I didn't think I would become a criminal, when I'm the victim."  
"One of the men, he grabbed me, held my hands behind my back. I wanted to fight, I probably should have but it seemed starter to try to talk my way out than fight. came out, started speaking in Japanese. I don't know what they were saying, I studied French in college. I think he ordered them to kill me, because they started to drag me out… But then he stopped them. He had them make me kneel in front of him. I thought, it seemed like he was going to assault me. I was going to scream right then. I finally realized I was in real danger, you know? But they found some lab gloves and stuck a handful in my mouth."  
"He left for a few minutes, and he came back with a needle, and a vial of solution. Of course, I knew what it was. I had been working on it for months. It was a solution that contained the virus, for the gene therapy technique. The ones we were giving the mice. He took the needle, he filled it with the solution, and had one man hold open my eyes. H-he stuck the needle in, right into my eye like we do with the mice. He put the solution into both eyes as I thrashed and screamed and cried. I've never felt such pain like that in my life."  
She's crying softly now as she tells us, straining against her restraints. "I couldn't handle it, I passed out. When I woke up… I was in a puddle of blood. At first I thought it was my own, I thought they'd fucking gutted me. I started screaming. But I realized I was fine. But there was one of the Japanese men, specifically the one who'd held me down, his throat was… it was mangled. I was soaked in his blood. But, but he was breathing just slightly. He was breathing when the cops came in, but I was holding onto a piece of a broken test tube."  
"It was then that a few things happened. First, three police officers burst in, guns raised, screaming. Then, I start screaming. I laid down, put my hands on my head. When I did that, when they started to handcuff me… I started seeing dots. Black dots, all over my vision. Through everything, that's what worried me most. I knew what this treatment could do. It took a few hours, but I lost my sight in the precinct. I don't know why I went blind, and didn't get hyper-senses or anything. All I know is, I'm blind, that guy is in a coma, and I've been in a hospital bed for two weeks with bandages over my eyes."

"Can you believe that, Matt? They fucking blinded her! And then set her up!" Foggy exclaims. I'm holding onto his arm as he leads me back to the office, my cane in the other hand. I'm angry, I'm pissed off beyond belief. I almost couldn't believe Cathleen's story myself, if I didn't already know what people were capable of. I was determined to get her out of this situation, but it would be hard. For once, the cops had done their jobs but there was no evidence of anything to corroborate her story that was concrete. Sure, it's kind of hard to believe she put the needle in her own eyes, but that could be used as motive to kill the Japanese dude.  
"Foggy, she wasn't lying. She didn't try to kill that man. They're going to play it off in court like she did this to herself, and then killed him because he saw. God, maybe they'll start a case around the fact that she's a comic book fan and tried to make herself into a superhero or something. They'll get creative, and they'll nail her ass to the wall if we don't stop them." "Matt," he says, "You can.. you can find out who's doing this right? I wouldn't normally, uh, suggest using your 'methods' but we need a head start. We need a head to hang up on our wall." "I think it's the yakuza. Maybe this is their new 'Black Sky'. Maybe they're creating mutants almost, or trying. Can you imagine? Every criminal I fight being, well, like me? Hell's Kitchen would go down in flames." I say angrily. "Honestly, the whole damn city would." "We need to stop this." Foggy responds. "We need to bring her justice." 


End file.
